I’m starting to learn about this social networking thing. Somewhere in Facebook, I was asked to Join a new group/circle for Coupes. A young unknown to me nth degree removed cousin started the group and the membership is growing fast. From the mouth of babes do good ideas sprout (ignore the ugly images you pervert).

Even more interesting, two very distant to me Coupes claim to have way-back historical documents. One, the migration to Canada and then to the US in 1852 and a tease for another history back to the 17th century. That really be would neat to read.

It’s a whole lot of fun. The young lady started something she can’t control. Do not disturb the sleeping Coupes. We are currently discussing talking about the proper pronunciation. NO ONE , on all the continents, of all the Coupes says cou-pay.

Just In case you wondered about that

I spent a lot of time this afternoon watching some old Phil Donahue interviews with Milton Friedman from way back in 1979 and 1980. I’ve never watch a full hour of Phil (it was too pandering for me, even back when I believed that the government know best and will fix things) Way back before Oprah, Phil catered to the mommies who want to rule the world. That was Phil’s method of getting a paycheck.

It’s interesting to watch Phil talk with an intelligent opponent who eviscerates the emotional platform of pandering that was the Donahue show. Some kind, respectful words, some facts and history that Phil had no clue about to form a rebuttal other than change the subject without conceding the point. Just count the times Phil changed the subject when losing! Milton even took audience questions (mostly women, but that was back in those old days of daytime TV pandering to women so it’s got to be different now, eh)

Links to 1979 Interview. [to YouTube]
Links to a 1980 interview

I really do encourage you to watch. I don’t link often. You don’t have to agree, just hear what the other side is arguing with the emotional filters removed.

Back then, in 1979/80 the concerns were about a Chrysler bailout and the gawd awful inflation (12% according to the video). I remember that time. I thought Carter would save us from the Nixon hang over and Reagen was a Hollywood dufus. Well, it’s 30 years later. Carter didn’t save us. Reagen didn’t save us but he did clean up a lot feces so I’ll reluctantly give him credit for not stinking up the joint any worse, and maybe it was better than what he started with– I wouldn’t build a monument with tax dollars to celebrate that although it is pretty rare for a President to actually fix anything in 8 years.

It was only Saturday weekend news so I wasn’t paying attention but some reporter at NBC actually managed to question the Obama talking heads about accuracy of their “we’ve created 150K jobs”. claim Oh, oh, you bad turd. Reporters don’t need facts any more. You kneel. Kiss his ring and he tells you how good it’s going to be. You print it. If you grow balls between Friday night and Sunday Morning we won’t tell you anything ever again. Capice? Is that a career move for you, nephew?

I wonder what would happen if Oprah met someone with facts? Silly talk. They aren’t allowed.

I finally got around to converting one vinyl album to mp3 in Linux. I may even have moved it to the file server where the Buffalo LinkTheater can find it. The whole freaking point of my adventures into the real time kernel was to record without computer caused hiccups (scratchy and warp vinyl is a different problem). Somewhere in those adventures, over the months, I did record a few albums (.wav files) but I never got around to converting them to MP3 and moved to the proper place where all the clients can access the files in a music fan friendly way.

I’m not saying my path is perfect way to do this task. Ubuntu 8.04 was horrible at recording from the mic. 8.10 was much better. 9.04-rt? Hasn’t been tested. (getting it running was enough fun). I don’t expect worse from it. The recordings from 8.10 are not perfect but after you smear them with 192Kbps MP3 compression you won’t hear the errors, even though you know they are there. You get caught up in the music, it’s good enough.

Audiophiles will have a problem with my “good enough”. Reasonable people can disagree. Purists won’t agree with any definition of “good enough” if there is a budget restriction. For me, the difference between 192k and 320k MP3 encoding is not enough to get excited about. Yeah, I can hear it but do I really care? 128k is execrable to me.

I may never listen to these songs again. It’s only nostalgia for me. 192 or 320? Do I really care.

I compiled a version of Audacity (1.3.37) from source with the real-time headers and a flag or two to enable ffmpeg for export. For what I want to do Audacity is the right tool, if you compile from source. What your Linux distro provides is probably not what I want. Mine detects if Jackd is running. It detects if ALSA is running and since they are mutually exclusive you only get the one that’s enabled. There’s no manual to speak of but it’s close to what Roxio provides in there’s recording application.

I imported a 40 minute .wav file into Audacity — Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan. The recording didn’t need any click and pop processing. Just select the wave form of the song and File->Export Selection…. I get a form to fill out the ID3 meta data .Move onto the next track, change the metadata (track # and title). I works very well, even better than what I remember from Roxio in OS X where you had to haul it into iTunes to do any meta data.

You will screw up the metadata. EasyTag will fix that far easier than iTunes once you learn it (there’s a learning hurdle for iTunes and metadata, too) Want to know the biggest problem? Getting the user name/group/permissions right between the NAS server, the Linux desktop and the Buffalo LinkTheater and waiting for that poor overloaded NAS chip to reindex.

It sounds like an awful process. Not really. Recording is not pretty in any OS or Application. It wasn’t pretty when you had a vinyl album and a cassette tape recorder. It’s really not better now.
Firing up a bittorent client and leaching the album off the net? Much simpler. There’s a legal, economic and social angle to making your own copies that deserves some thought.

No, you don’t care about my crops but you’ll still suffer to read this just in case I say something interesting.

The shallots are in seed and fallen over. The Yukon Potatoes erupted with long floppy stalks and huge leaves that make me think my name is Seymor. Feed Me. They have potato flowers. If they don’t eat me first, I’ll get some spuds. The tomatoes are behaving quite nicely. Spinach and lettuce are no shows with all the wacky weather. How many years has that happened? A lot. Oddly, the leeks, the crop I know the least about are pretty happy. Go damn figure.

And then I spied the chili pepper, genus Home Depot Salsa Garden. The bees have busy. That bad boy is growing some peppers out of nowhere. A week ago it a a few flowers. Now I have three inch long pencil thin peppers. If the spuds don’t get me the peppers will.

Summer arrives, after a wild spring. No, I’m not going to complain and yes it is worse somewhere else. Weather is local. Climate is something else. Yesterday I actually saw a TV weatherman make that point to the lead babbler who was trying to connect the dots into a story of his own making. Damn weatherman refused to play the game.

Here in Boise, it’s stopped raining, the temps are predicted to get too hot but that will be a different whine. I got off my lazy white ass and pruned some trees and bushes. I’ve got much more to do but every once in a while I do something useful and that feels good.

Young’uns are out on the sidewalks in the day and racing down the street at night. The sounds of fireworks in the distance. It’s summer. I’ve got flowers on the potatoes so I’ll get a crop but you know, I’m just growing next years compost.. The leeks might be OK. The shallots? I can see so much recurring disappointment in them that I detect a pattern. Perhaps it’s me. The shallots hate me. End of story. Give up or learn something.

The chili is looking promising and the tomatoes are looking good. I’ll have cherry tomatoes in a month, followed by more than I can use. I’ve got a quart or two of last years tomato sauce in the freezer. I better find a way to use it or the whole grow your own idea is as busted as growing shallots.

It’s been a few weeks since I did something stupid interesting. I decided to patch and install the latest Linux kernel with the latest realtime patches. You might remember that the RT kernel didn’t work for me in a simple UbuntuStudio 9.04 install. Not really a big deal to me once I got a generic kernel installed. But, patches have occurred and loose ends need tied.

I downloaded the source code for Linux 2.6.29-5 and patched it with rt-21. Compiled and installed and booted and damn, go to hell, it works (aka doesn’t crash like the old RT kernel did). Except Jackd whines about some loadable modules and that’s because the kernel build crapped out at the end because my Nvidia driver wouldn’t compile and the module map didn’t get updated properly

Don’t go here children. I ended up in the grub command line menu and the rescue CD. Not a pretty place to hang out in. I wasn’t panicked but I might have been a tiny bit concerned. I don’t have a recipe for forcing the nvidia (v180) driver to recompile that I want to share or proclaim as the definitive way. You do have to remove the driver, reboot, and reinstall it and fix your Grub errors.

On the gripping hand, it works. I should reboot just to make sure. One more time. Yup, It still works. JackCtl doesn’t whine about module mapping, yeah! RhythmBox works as expected (it doesn’t know jack but that’s a positive. There’s probably a way to make them play nice. Not important to me. Now that I’ve got a real time kernel, I can explore Jack and the app’s that use it. Sweet.

[Update June 22, 2009]
I only thought it worked - when this morning’s series of net patches arrived, they failed. I did a lot more dancing to really, really, really get rid of Nvidia and reinstall just the one driver i want (1 is the correct number) for a custom kernel. Not pretty at all.

I got lost in a long thread of comments about Global Warming (now called Climate Change) at ARS Techinca and when I wanted to reply there was no box or button for me. I have a website though. I’ll write it here. No one will read it and it won’t change anyones opinions maybe. Of course the comments immediately fall into name calling and accusations of ad-hominem and straw-man arguments and then the faithful from both sides get involved with selective out of context quotes. Public discourse.

My particular whipping meme is the “it’s settled science” attitude that so many “we’re going to hell in a handbasket” believers feel a need to follow. I don’t believe it’s settled science. Not at all. Too many unknown or questionable values input to “we’re scientists” secret models. It might be an accurate prediction although the scientists do admit the models don’t account for a whole lot of important things which are not known at this point in our collective knowledge of a chaotic system. Consensus opinion is worthless when it proven wrong. I won’t list all the times “consensus” has been bitch slapped with a newly discovered fact (or developed a history of “oops that was a bad decision”). It happens. All the time.

There’s a lovely little game played out “Show me the peer reviewed papers for the Global Cooling Crisis in the 1970’s” If you could find and digitize them onto the internet, they’d find another nit. (Weren’t all your children going to die from the Ozone holes a the poles? CFC’s are bad you know?)Are those holes smaller now than then? I really don’t know. Do you?

There’s a misunderstanding about the authority of peer review. If 20 scientists with a 20 climate models want to publish one study each, how many peer reviewers will actually build the model and run the experiments and tweak the variables looking for edge cases? How many failures to confirm are reported? Assuming they can get the code and the data and the data is mostly clean (a huge assumption for climate science) Hell, that’s a lot of work for reviewers. My understanding of peer review is that it is not about recreating the experiment, it is about whether is it worthy of publication. Big difference between checking grammar and verifying truthiness. Too many knee jerk defenders of science depend on the peer review process and consensus to make their point, just like some folks depend on the Torah/Bible/Quaran as the only truth (as interpreted this year) that you need to know.

Science isn’t a popularity vote. Or a biased PR release for a study from the always correct (for you) government funded mouthpiece . Sadly, skeptics don’t always remember that science isn’t a religion. It’s not a faith. You don’t fight faith with a different faith. Wrong game, wrong premise. No wonder skeptics and deniers are unloved. We fell into the trap of popularity and brought a lot of bad science with us.

There isn’t as much spam in the blogs. Even the human entered “Nice post, you make a great point. Thank you.” Those have been near zero for several days, perhaps longer. You never notice the absence of annoyance until much later. There could be several reasons.

1) The authorities did shutter an ISP/hosting site recently that was well known for being a bad network citizen. If that’s the cause of the decline, it’s just temporary until the scum find new hosts. The permanent solution is to make every body smarter than those who wish to exploit them. I don’t see either of those things happening. We can try.

2) They took the list of sites that allowed their manual “Nice Post” comment and moved them into the master list the botnets will use to spam, In that case, smart site owners have decent defenses. (if they care to look for them). I’m guessing (fantasying) that paying people to find open comment blogs is a bad business practice for spammers. Given the economy, criminals may not have the money to pay their stooges. There’s probably just as many stooges though but maybe they all got burned. Nice dream. The other side of the coin. Stupid cons vs. stupid victims.

3) The cons finally got enough money to make an Infomercial on TV because that’s where the real money is (along with their ads in what’s left of the print media). I suspect this is the holy grail of all spammers - “If our product doesn’t work, could we afford to make this commercial?”

Yes you could. Not forever if you run of idiots to sell too, but long enough to pile up some cash (I hope they spent it on Ca and Fl real estate at the top of the bubble). Our government spends huge sums on things that don’t work, never will work and in many cases just makes things worse.

Enzyte is not the only thing that doesn’t work. Herbal remedies don’t work (with a very few “maybes”). Homeopathy doesn’t work (it’s only water). You cannot have a conversation with dead people unless you want to hear yourself twice, once removed.

I’m sure you’ve heard the story about the woman in Israel who threw out her mothers mattress which just happened to have Mum’s life savings, one million dollars. It made all the news outlets with pictures of the women combing the landfill.

I smell shenanigans. I don’t how big a pile of random small bills of Israeli currency it takes to make a million dollars, but I’m guessing it weighs a lot and its probably larger than than a mattress. US $1M from someone who doesn’t trust banks (so no interest, no investments) Just how did this women acquire this fortune? If it existed.

Read this bit of reporting carefully and see if the story is the same one you heard reported.
Money quote: “Annat told Army Radio that when her mother realized her queen-sized bank had been tossed, she told her to “‘leave it.’”" . Perhaps it was only a Million Zimbabwean dollars?

It’s even more ironic that the above link goes to a TV station reporting off of the AP feed. I wonder what the station put on the air that night? Did anyone read it and think. Nowhere in America?

Those wacky dreams. I don’t interpret them. I know better, but they are fun to examine. Like reviewing the plot line for a drama (or a comedy) to see if it worthy for further development. Here we go.

I was some sort of consultant and sent to a military base/complex in Korea. This Korea looked a lot like the ferry terminal in Victoria BC and the weather was a lot more like southern California. (Dreams don’t make sense, just go with flow). I’m sitting in a outdoor area at a picnic table outside the buildings where my meeting will occur. Around me is a group of people and they are the people I’m to conference with but they want three separate meetings because I’m there to fix or talk about three different things.

I sort them out. A group where is it’s a courtesy meet with political tones. They want to bitch about the home office (or the contract or whatever it is I’m doing here). Then I have to meet with a bunch of tech-heads who have been fighting between themselves about some details and I get to be the judge, probably related to the first group. And if I have time, since I know so much about some software unrelated to the contract and the real reason I’m here, could I help this one person with her problem. An unremarkable women, in the crowd but not part of the crowd. Out of place in this group but hoping for an audience. OK, whatever. If I have the time at the end of the day, I’ll help.

Of course meetings don’t happen that way. While we’re all sitting at the picnic tables in the shade, the bosses get called to another emergency, and the geek smack down is scheduled for an hour later and can’t be moved up. I sense they’d be willing recreated their grievances in the break area, right now but who want to start they day that way. I tell them to find something else to do for an hour and I’ll help the woman with the unrelated problem. This is not well received but they reluctantly leave.

Up to this point, this is almost exactly what happens in real life when the expert from the home office comes to visit (or take a beating for the home office team)

I ask the woman if she has an office we can go to and look at her computer. Actually the woman looks like Rebecca Meehan but you’d have to stay up really late watching CNBC to know the name. Mildly attractive but not so much you’d do something stupid. She leads me into the building through the crowded desks and cubicles to a blank wall. “In here”. Part of the wall is those long hanging strips of vinyl and she vanishes into them. I have to inch my way past a space heater (or an Ionic Breeze) and I’m a bathroom and a damn small bathroom. Just barely enough space for two to stand between the wall the bathtub.

She throws her arms around my neck. She says “Gawd I’m horny!”. I say, “you might have the wrong guy” and she says “Maybe, maybe not” and then somehow (the magic of dreams) we fall into the tub without breaking my head but I tore her necklace loose as I fell backwards. She was pissed about that, fun over. Little jewels came out of their settings and rattled around the tub. I’d find one and give it to her as she sat on top of me glaring. She’d find the place in the necklace if came from and glare at me more.

I woke up

There’s enough reality in there to be a real plot and I don’t mind filling it in a little further. If you’re a sci-fi writer you might spin a tale that the jewels control some time machine or gateway to another dimension and for some reason It’s my big problem now. It’s not an unknown story line. Hardly used ;^)

If I were a Romance writer, how would it proceed? It might have been her great grandmothers necklace, each jewel has the name of a family member. She’s always been told to keep it whole or there will be no inheritance. She’s so noble that together we unravel the mystery or the necklace and fortune That’s got to be a brand new story line, eh?

Or “What would Calle do?”. Well, she wouldn’t be in a bath tub with a woman straddling her. Would … not … happen… ever. Don’t even think about it. I think that story line has been used.

That does mean a new weave is impossible.